Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

She was ready to be a simple, devoted wife. Tentatively, at least. Though she loved him so hard her heart would leap when she heard the crunch of his tires on the drive, she knew, with a tiny corner of her mind, that love was still an experiment for her, she was prepared, in the end, to fail—not that she was planning on it. She would fight for him, and if she won, his love for her would take care of her faint reservation.

Joan Orrick needed no formal announcement that the fight was on. When Martin told her his plan to divorce her immediately after the trip to Spain, she flew at once to the most powerful weapon available: the Ferndeans. She told them on the phone of Martin’s love affair and of hitting Martin with a log and of his terrible, dazed drive to Indianapolis. The Ferndeans, shocked and grieved, asked them to come over. Then, fierce-eyed as her grandma Lulu Frazier, but with no evil in her heart, nothing in her heart but a violent longing for a loving, absolutely faithful marriage like her parents’ marriage, or that of Martin’s parents, she told Martin what she’d done.

“How could you?” he said, and by his horrified look she knew it was as bad, in Martin’s eyes, as her smashing of Sarah’s clock.

She had no answer to give him. It had not been a conscious act of self-defense, and it hadn’t been at all that she wanted them to see how he treated her, wanted them to see that gross, black bruise. She had acted, simply. And now, seeing through Martin’s eyes how painful it would be for Nadine and John—because what could they do?—she thought, like Martin, that what she’d done was wretched, inexcusable.

But they went, Joan’s bruise grotesquely covered by white cream, Martin’s head misshapen, and sat crying in the room where John Ferndean lay, crying with them, breathing with difficulty—beginning to drown—his wife puffy-faced on the side of his bed, crying as she’d been doing since Joan Orrick phoned.

“We love you,” Nadine said. “Why must you kill each other?”

Martin could remember none of it afterward, except their sorrow and helplessness and his huge load of guilt. He watched Joan talking to them—he himself said almost nothing—and couldn’t even hate her for having done this thing. She was like a child, a child he’d loved. He thought of how all her life she’d ruled him, led him around, guided him to dark rooms or groves for their childhood love-making, thought of how he’d loved her voice when she called him at his father’s house from St. Louis, how they’d laughed together, holding hands, when his uncle George told stories, or played French horn and piano together, under Yegudkin’s sharp black eye. Why couldn’t they have been like her parents? he wondered. But they’d been similar kinds of people, her mother and father, just as his parents had been similar kinds of people; and all their lives he and Joan had been deadly opposites. He remembered how he’d loved going to church as a child—loved the singing, the responsive reading, the long pastoral harangue. Joan was indifferent to all that. If she went at all, it was for the organ music. She was so little interested in the ideas and myths that she used “heaven” and “Armageddon” interchangeably. (He would learn much later that he was wrong about her there. She was in fact interested, but her ignorance made her shy of asking. Every time she went to her psychiatrist in Detroit, she would go with Paul to the cathedral, now attended mainly by blacks, and she would bask in its beauty—and the merry, chatty, holy foolishness of the congregation, shaking hands on all sides, wandering up and down the aisles, putting up colorful signs: JESUS IS NUMBER ONE—as her mother had once basked in the order and dignity of the Mass, the warmth of grass and flowers on a convent lawn. Joan Orrick was in fact, like her mother, profoundly religious.)

“We just wish there was something we could do,” John Ferndean said. “We feel so helpless.”

“I know,” Martin said. “Look, we’re grateful—”

“I know, I know.” John Ferndean touched his wife’s hand, and the love in the gesture made Martin sick with grief, thinking, Why you, not us? And: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

John died within a year. Martin and Joan watched, visited nearly every night, took care of his family as well as they could, given their own desperate situation, and went to Spain and southern France with them afterward to stare at famous ruins, Martin looking helpless and stable as a wall, no longer mad, though more eccentric than ever, and full of sorrow. Nadine Ferndean spoke to him as he’d heard her speak to her husband, in the trips they’d taken before, saying, “Hannibal couldn’t have crossed the Alps.” John would have answered, “Of course he could! Look there!” But Martin could say nothing. Even if his eyes were not blurred by tears, what did he know of Hannibal? They went down into the dark and frightening cave where people had hidden at the time of the Inquisition. “Reminds you of Stonehenge, doesn’t it,” she said, “—the feeling, I mean.” He had never been to Stonehenge. Johnny, lad, he thought, I forgot to tell you. I hated you for dying.

At the end of the Spanish trip, Joan began to cry, hour after hour in their stateroom, not asking for sympathy or attention, simply .mourning her marriage, her children, Martin, and the beautiful, talented child-Joan wasted and betrayed. She had decided to kill herself. Martin, when he learned, squinted in disbelief, then said, helplessly, “Don’t. I’ll stay.”

“Will you really?” It was a plea. She was beyond shame now.

He nodded.

Seventeen

Sarah Fenton was small and thin. Like all macrobiotics, she had an Oriental look—large, mournful eyes, straight, lively hair (it was as black as coal), and the dry, pale mouth of someone who has lost blood. She was thirty-five (Martin